There is nothing to stop the Tracker, or your blog, or any of us from growing faster than Upworthy and attracting millions of readers in six months–except our own cleverness.
Getting those readers to pay you is a little more complicated, but not much. If you can attract millions of readers, you can probably attract millions of dollars in advertising.
But it’s even easier than that. If you’re not prepared to hire and manage a national sales force, you can simply sign on with one of the new crowd-funded journalism sites that arrange for you to be paid directly by readers, not indirectly through their purchases of Froot Loops.
That’s what six contributors to The Science Writers’ Handbook, decided to do. Calling themselves FLUX, they put up a pitch July 1 on the crowd-funding site Beacon asking for $25,000 to support a story project called Bracing for Impact, which promised “stories of nature, culture, science, as well as resilience and weakness in a shifting world.”
Beacon provides complete access to its stories to any reader who pays at least $5 a month to support a journalism project such as FLUX. The money is shared by all the journalists, but a bigger share goes to the reader’s favorite writers.
The writers in this case–Hannah Hoag, Susan Moran, Sarah Webb, Amanda Mascarelli, and Emily Gertz–were fortunate to get matching funds from Beacon, which wanted to encourage environmental projects. So they needed to raise only $12,500 to make their goal.
,They did that in one month, and they’ve since raised nearly $2,000 more.
By any measure, this would seem to be a success. That money will enable them, they promise, to produce “at least six months of content.”
So let’s do the math: Six writers sharing $25,000 for six months. That’s about $700 a month for each of the writers. How many stories will each of them produce over their six-month, crowd-funded run? If they each write once a month, the $700 per story will be modest, even by freelance standards.
We can’t expect to get serious journalism with that kind of compensation. I’m not saying that FLUX isn’t planning to do good work–they are certainly capable of it. But if they write serious, important stories for six months, as they promised–and as I expect them to–they will be writing for quite a bit less than they are worth.
Maybe the project isn’t such a success after all. Indeed, Beacon seems to be counting on that kind of selfless dedication to expand its content.
Furthermore, if I’m reading the site’s terms correctly, writers get 70% of the money that comes in. So that $700 per writer per month will shrink to about $500 per month.
Even so, Webb told me in an email, “We have ambitious plans to do important work covering climate change adaptation and resilience.”
Adrian Sanders, one of Beacon’s three founders, said as much to Nieman Journalism Lab last year, shortly after the site was established. “When we first started out, I think the dream was that someone could make rent doing this,” he said. But that’s no longer the dream.
Dan Fletcher, another co-founder, said, ““People are in different situations looking for different things. Some folks are really happy just to have a place to tell the types of stories they can’t tell anywhere else, and that as much [as] the money, is a part of the value proposition.” I, for one, am happy to have a place to tell the stories I want to tell, but I do have to make the rent. At Beacon, it’s apparently not possible to do both.
Caroline O’Donovan, who wrote the Nieman Lab piece, was skeptical. “It seems unlikely that many readers will feel they’re missing out without a subscription to Beacon. That doesn’t mean Beacon is doomed — but it might mean that the founders aren’t as close to unraveling the mysteries of the future of journalism as some of their rhetoric suggests,” she wrote.
Others, such as Laura Shin at The Poynter Institute, bought in. “Crowdfunding has become a way to support journalism projects from one-off articles to the wholesale launch of new publications,” she wrote when the site was founded.
And now, Beacon finds itself in the midst of a controversy over whether crowd-funding should be used to send a HuffingtonPost reporter to Ferguson, Missouri to cover the racial unrest there.
Beacon is not the guilty party here. It has drawn praise for quickly establishing its own project to send journalists to Ferguson, which Anthony Ha of TechCrunch called “a startup crowdfunding campaign that I can get behind.”
The controversy was sparked by the HuffingtonPost, which is using Beacon to raise $40,000 to “hire a local citizen journalist who’s been covering the turmoil and train her to become a professional journalist.” The Ferguson Fellowship, as the HuffingtonPost calls it, will support continued coverage “after everybody leaves.”
According to Forbes, HuffingtonPost has an audience of 95 million. It has between $100 million and $300 million in annual revenues, according to analysts’ estimates.
Was Beacon created to help this media giant raise $40,000? Why doesn’t the HuffingtonPost hire a reporter? The situation in Ferguson isn’t easy to cover, and hiring a senior correspondent would make a lot more sense than training a reporter on the street, amid tear gas and rubber bullets.
Here’s my take on all of this: Crowd-funding is a beautiful dream. And Beacon is an intelligent implementation of that dream. Everyone involved here–with the possible exception of the HuffingtonPost–has good intentions, I think. But the time when we can make a living from crowd-funded journalism seems a long way off.
And Webb agrees that the time isn’t here yet:
Even from the early stages, our code phrase for this project was “The Experiment.” Ultimately we see this project as a startup, and this initial fundraising is seed money to get it off the ground. We hope that as we produce good work we will also gain new subscribers. In addition, we’re thinking about partnerships and other ways that we can make the project more financially viable over the long term. It’s a brave new world out there in journalism, and we’re testing the waters with this new business model.
I wish them well.
We should note that this is not an entirely new experiment–crowd-funding has been around for centuries. Ask any author. Many authors receive advances to support them while writing books, but the real money comes from crowd-funding: Readers who lay down $25 to buy a book are part of a crowd who fund journalism projects, and fiction, and poetry.
And we know what the track record is there: For a tiny group of authors, crowd-funding is wildly successful. For all the rest, crowd-funding doesn’t work too well; few books earn enough from the crowd to pay back their advances. The writers’ end their projects in debt (although it’s a debt that publishers absorb.)
All the same, crowd-funding is a beautiful dream. I’ve done it with four books, and now I’m getting started on number five.
-Paul Raeburn
Susan Moran says
Pardon the late comment. I got engaged in the Twitter dialogue about this. As a Flux member, I agree that the jury is out as to whether this kind of crowdfunding is a sustainable model for journalists. But these tumultuous times call for experimentation, and we’ll see how it goes. And I want to point out the true “beacons” on the Beacon trail: Climate Confidential, the first enviro/climate project to launch on Beacon. They’ve raised a good amount of money and published lots of probing and fresh stories.